Sean Crookston

VCAP-DCA Objective 4.3 : Configure a vSphere Environment to Support MSCS Clustering

August 26, 2010

Sean Crookston

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Another VCAP-DCA objective here. For a complete list of study objectives for the VCAP-DCA ( VDCA-410) browse to http://www.seancrookston.com/vcap-dca/.

This is the first pass through the objective for configuring MSCS Clustering. Your biggest resource for this section will be the Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service document from VMware. If you haven’t already bought an iPad or another reading, device maybe now is the time to justify it. There is a lot of reference material to go through for this test.

If you haven’t already done so, download the zip file full of additional study resources from Kendrick Coleman’s blog. These can be found at his VCAP exam landing page. He has compiled a lot of resources and broken them down by objective, and these make great additional reading if you are not greatly familiar with any of the following.

Knowledge

Identify MSCS clustering solution requirements

Identify the three supported MSCS configurations

Clustering virtual machines on a single host
Storage can be local or on a san.
Clustering virtual machines across physical hosts
Clustering physical machines with virtual machines

Skills and Abilities

Configure Virtual Machine hardware to support cluster type and guest OS

See requirements above.

Configure a MSCS cluster on a single ESX/ESXi Host

Refer to the Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service document for complete guidance on the process. Note that with a cluster on a single box you could used local storage or shared storage.
A cluster on a single ESX(i) host requires A separate physical network adapter for clustered virtual machines to connect with external hosts.

Configure a MSCS cluster across ESX/ESXi Hosts

A cluster across ESX(i) hosts requires

Two physical network adapters dedicated to the MSCS cluster and to the public and private networks.

One physical network adapter dedicated to the service console (ESX hosts) or the VMkernel (ESXihosts).

Fibre Channel (FC) SAN. Shared storage must be on an FC SAN.

RDM in physical compatibility (pass-through) or virtual compatibility (non-pass-through) mode. VMware recommends physical compatibility mode. The cluster cannot use virtual disks for shared storage.

Note-Failover clustering with Windows Server 2008 is not supported with virtual compatibility mode (nonpass-through) RDMs.

Refer to the Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service document for complete guidance on the process.

Configure standby host clustering (Cluster physical and virtual machines)

Standby host clustering requires:

Two physical network adapters dedicated to the MSCS cluster and to the public and private networks.

One physical network adapter dedicated to the service console (ESX hosts) or the VMkernel (ESXi hosts).

Use RDMs in physical compatibility mode (pass-through RDM). You cannot use virtual disks or RDMs in virtual compatibility mode (non-pass-through RDM) for shared storage.

Use the STORport Miniport driver for the Fibre Channel (FC) HBA (QLogic or Emulex) in the physicalWindows machine.

Do not run multipathing software in the physical or virtual machines.

Use only a single physical path from the host to the storage arrays in standby host configurations.

Refer to the Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service document for complete guidance on the process.

The following limitations also exist to using MSCS clustering(not supported)

Clustering on iSCSI, FCoE, and NFS disks.
Mixed environments, such as configurations where one cluster node is running a different version of ESX/ESXi than another cluster node.
Clustered virtual machines as part of VMware clusters (DRS or HA).
Use of MSCS in conjunction with VMware Fault Tolerance.
Migration with VMotion of clustered virtual machines.
N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
With native multipathing (NMP), clustering is not supported when the path policy is set to round robin.
You must use hardware version 7 with ESX/ESXi 4.0.

Tools

Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service
Product Documentation
vSphere Client

Sean Crookston